Roger Ver & The Free Ross Campaign on the Crypto Clothesline – Part 3

In the third instalment of our 3-part series on the Free Ross Campaign we chat with Roger Ver about Ross Ulbricht.

This 3-part series is dedicated to Ross Ulbricht, the man behind the Silk Road e-commerce website who’s serving a double-life sentence plus 40 years for victimless crimes.

In a surprising, mind-set-challenging and outspoken way, Roger Ver, founder of Bitcoin.com, libertarian and a loyal supporter of the Free Ross campaign, speaks up against the overwhelming power of the State.

He claims that it’s the law-makers, people who create rules behind closed doors without our consent, nor real public concerns and interests in mind, who are the real villains, the real criminals, the ones that should be locked up:

“And the interaction of people with the state is not voluntary. The state tells people that they have to do this, or they have to pay for that, and if they don’t, there’ll be locked in a cage in prison for not obeying…

“How can these representatives: ‘representatives’ and ‘government’, how do they have the ability or the moral legitimacy to do things that none of the people they represent, have the right to do?

“…the worst things ever accomplished by humanity are done by the heads of governments.”

The interview with Roger revealed the fundamental reasons behind his support for Ross, stems from their shared beliefs.

“The vast majority of us are philosophically aligned with the idea that we own ourselves and we own our own bodies and we don’t need a bunch of people bossing us around in regards to what we can or can’t put in our own bodies. And I think Ross is of a similar mindset there. As someone who’s been in federal prison myself, I saw exactly how these people get treated but somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people were there for victimless crimes, which for the most part meant buying, selling or using drugs.”

Roger Ver is a libertarian and voluntaryist which means he seeks to maximise political freedom and autonomy, emphasising freedom of choice and voluntary association. Roger explains that the incarceration of Ross has done nothing to lessen the sale of drugs and crime and instead we’re in fact seeing more of these things.

“There are more dark-net markets than ever before. Selling more things than ever before. But if you look at the ones that are out there now, they’re much less philosophically pure. The Silk Road specifically forbade anything being allowed to be sold whose sole purpose was to harm others. Whereas now a lot of these dark-net markets just allow anything. And that’s really disappointing for somebody who wants everybody to deal with everybody on a voluntary basis.”

Roger goes on to share his concerns around the heartbreaking number of victims of extreme sentencing.

“My heart goes out to all these people. It’s not just Ross, he’s one of literally millions of people who’s in prison for having committed no crime against any victim whatsoever. His only crime was disobedience against the state. If anything, I think disobedience against the state is a virtue, not a crime. I just want to let my voice be heard in regards to that. If nobody speaks out, who else? So, the more of us that speak out, the better. I’m lucky enough at this point in my life to have a bit of a platform. I want to use that platform to spread the ideas that are important to me.”

Ross Ulbricht is just one of millions who have been imprisoned for victimless crimes and the Free Ross Campaign‘s primary focus is on striking the root of this problem.

Roger explains that the whole idea of locking people up for crimes with no victim needs to come to an end:

“If there’s no victim, there’s no crime and anybody that’s trying to prosecute somebody for a victimless crime… that prosecutor is the real criminal that needs to be stopped. And so that’s true of Ross’s case and it’s true of all these other cases out there with, for victimless crime.”

Roger is also outspoken about the main reason, in his opinion, that Ross Ulbricht was given such a harsh and unreasonable prison sentence, that seemingly will see his life end in there if not legally ‘pardoned’ by Donald Trump and advisors, is not the fact that Silk Road encouraged trading in Bitcoin or that there were drugs being sold…

Roger unequivocally claims that Ulbricht was imprisoned for treason– for speaking up against the State and encouraging Silk Road users to be free of the binds of the government.

This, Roger states, is the real reason for his damning imprisonment:

“I think it’s just they get really, really upset with people that don’t bow down and kiss the ring of the state…

“I think we need to take away the power from the state to be able to destroy lives in those ways.

“Disobedience is the biggest crime against the state.”

Ver also believes that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a means for everyday people to free themselves of the control of the State, whether they are aware of that iron-fist authority over their lives or not:

“The belief and the authority of government to do things that no individual can do is just a made-up mass hallucination and people need to stop and think about it and realise that it’s a bunch of nonsense…

“Not only is it a bunch of nonsense, but it leads to making the world a worse place than it otherwise would have been…

“This is a global revolt and I feel that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and the Internet really is, it’s a global revolt, not in any sort of violent way and it’s just a global revolt in the sense that now we’re building the tools in which individuals have the ability to tell the state, no, you don’t own me, you don’t own my life.”

We were really touched by the honesty (brutal at times) and courage to speak out openly against the powers that be, even to the extent that this man has denounced his US citizenship, with all the heartache and disconnection that implies, to be free of the laws of the US.

We at the Crypto Clothesline urge you to head to freeross.org and sign the petition to free Ross Ulbricht.